Immortal Paladin 421 Temple of the End

421 Temple of the End

Earth floated in the middle of the ruins.

It was so small it could fit in my palm.

Of course, it was not the Earth I rembered. Not the endless blue sphere wrapped in clouds and oceans and noise. This one was compact and more of an object rather than a world. And yet, it was my soul.

Or rather, it ‘served’ as my soul.

The reason I had once been perceived as soulless was painfully simple in hindsight. This thing was too vast in essence, too dense in aning, and too large in what it represented. Souls, as others understood them, were the quintessential source of your being.

However, the ‘Source’ within was different. Perhaps, the ‘Earth’ within was just one surface of it, a facet of sothing so incomprehensible that calling it a soul was already a concession to language.

From that Source, I regenerated again.

I lay on the cold stone of the Temple of the End, staring into the vast expanse of outer space. Above us hung the False Earth, enormous and distant, with a sun and a moon obediently orbiting it like props on a stage. Erald robes wove themselves over my body, preserving whatever little dignity I still had left. The Hollow Star remained on my head, its presence heavy and constant, like a hand never quite loosening its grip.

I was furious.

But I couldn’t express it.

Not because I lacked will, but because every ti I tried, the other guy beat it out of .

Feng Wei stood beside , arms crossed, posture relaxed to the point of insult.

“Is that all you’ve got?” he asked. His voice carried no malice. That sohow made it worse.

I didn’t answer. I rolled onto my side instead, turning my back to him, and let quintessence spill out through Hollow Star. Stone cracked. Roots erupted. Trees rose from nothing, their trunks thick and green, leaves unfurling in a rush of life. In seconds, a forest surrounded us, vibrant and breathing beneath the fake stars.

Feng Wei scoffed. “A forest? That’s your answer?”

I stared at the canopy above . “I like trees,” I said flatly. “Green’s easy on the eyes.”

Silence lingered for a mont.

This thing on my head was convenient. With Hollow Star, I had crushed the Civil War, unified the Empire, bent fate itself into sothing manageable. But convenience always ca at a price. This wasn’t a crown.

It was a chain.

Supre Beings. Ancient Souls. Lost Gods.

I didn’t even care anymore.

Enemies. Friends. Titles. Roles.

“I just want them to leave alone,” I muttered.

Feng Wei’s gaze sharpened. “And you think sulking here accomplishes that?”

I clenched my jaw.

“You’re hiding,” he continued, his voice rising. “Your people are dying out there, Da Wei. Your world is collapsing, with tilines bleeding into each other, and you’re lying on the ground growing trees.”

“If you’d just let go,” I snapped, pushing myself up on one elbow, “I could do sothing. I could go there and fix it.”

“You’d lose,” Feng Wei said without hesitation.

The certainty in his tone was like a blade between my ribs.

I didn’t wait for him to say more.

I struck.

My foot swept low, thunder roaring as I invoked Thunderous Smite, aiming for his leg, hoping stupidly to catch him off guard. Feng Wei looked down, lifted his foot, and stomped.

Bone shattered and flesh tore.

Pain flared white-hot, but I rode it, forcing quintessence through the damage. Blessed Regeneration surged, rebuilding my leg mid-motion as I twisted into a roundhouse kick. Divine Smite ignited along my shin, the light so bright it carved shadows into the forest.

Feng Wei didn’t even blink.

Restrictions still weighed on . No Ultimate Skills. No Immortal Arts. Whatever seal he’d placed on was airtight. But Hollow Star flooded with quintessence, vast and inexhaustible, and I poured it into everything else.

Weapons blood into existence from swords, spears, halberds, and axes. There were dozens upon dozens I cast Blessed Weapon on all of them and hurled them forward with telekinesis, a storm of sanctified steel screaming toward him.

They never reached him.

The weapons collided mid-air, twisted by an unseen force, crashing into each other and detonating outward in a rain of fragnts and light.

A shadow fell over .

Feng Wei was already behind .

He punched once.

There was no technique to it. No flourish. Just a fist, carrying a force so absolute it erased context. My body didn’t break.

It ended.

The world folded inward, and I was reduced again and stripped down to the Source.

Once more, Earth floated in the center of the Temple of the End.

Feng Wei’s voice echoed through the ruins.

“This is pointless,” he said. “You know what you need to do.”

I didn’t respond.

“Stop running,” he continued. “Unseal your mories of Earth and get this over with, you stubborn fool!”

The state of my people in the Hollowed World was probably the only reason I could still move.

That thought alone was enough to push .

I unsealed my mories.

The process wasn’t violent. There was no scream, no flash of pain. It felt more like loosening a knot I had been pretending wasn’t there. mories I had consciously locked away surged back from Earth, my life before all of this, and the weight of being taken, repurposed, rewritten.

But then sothing else surfaced.

It was a mory of a voice. It was calm, vast, and neither male nor female.

“Destroy the world.”

“Destroy the stars.”

“Destroy this reality.

As if that alone wasn’t enough, the voice then added.

“When there is nothing left to resist you… make it right again.”

I blinked awake as my body regenerated from the Source, erald robes reforming around , Hollow Star settling back into place. The forest I had created earlier still stood, leaves rustling softly despite the void beyond.

I stared straight at Feng Wei.

“What was that?” I asked.

He didn’t look surprised.

“That is what you sealed deeper than the rest.”

I pushed myself upright, fists clenched. “That wasn’t just a mory. That was an order.”

Feng Wei nodded. “You unsealed what you consciously chose to forget. And what you were subconsciously made to forget.”

I laughed bitterly. “You’re telling soone shoved a doomsday directive into my head and I just… misplaced it?”

“There are many things I’m not at liberty to explain,” Feng Wei replied. “But I was not lying when I said I wanted to help you.”

“Then elaborate,” I said sharply. “Because right now it sounds like I’m a bomb waiting for the right trigger.”

He exhaled slowly, as if weighing every word.

“You were forged,” Feng Wei said at last. “Not born. Forged as a divine weapon.”

My jaw tightened. “A weapon for what?”

“To strike an enemy,” he answered, “that distorts reality itself.”

I t his gaze. “You an the Supre Beings.”

He shook his head.

“No. They were failures.”

The word landed heavier than any blow he had dealt .

“They were attempts,” Feng Wei continued. “Weapons that broke under their own contradictions. So collapsed. So rebelled. So tried to beco gods instead of tools.”

“And ?” I asked quietly.

“You might share their fate,” he said honestly. “But I have a good feeling about you.”

I looked away, running a hand through my hair.

“So let get this straight,” I said. “I was taken from my world, handed power that shattered the scale of existence, and conscripted into a war I don’t even understand. And you expect to trust you?”

“Yes,” Feng Wei replied without hesitation.

I turned back to him. “Why?”

“Because,” he said, “among the Ancient Souls and the Lost Gods, I am the only ally you will have at this mont.”

Sothing in his tone told he wasn’t boasting.

“There was a previous weapon,” Feng Wei continued. “Before you.”

My chest tightened. “What happened to it?”

“It did sothing unthinkable,” he said. “It split this world into two realities.”

He raised his hand and traced symbols in the air. Runes ford, humming with authority.

“Ti flows differently in each,” he went on. “One moves forward. The other… not so much.”

The runes shimred, then unfolded into a mirage.

A man appeared before .

He had my face.

Different armor wrapped his fra, darker, sharper in silhouette, carrying an authority that felt wrong just to look at. His eyes were colder than mine, heavier with certainty. Where I hesitated, he stood firm. Where I questioned, he seed to already know the answer.

Feng Wei gestured toward the image.

“This,” he said, “is the other result of that split.”

I swallowed.

“And what is he to ?”

Feng Wei t my eyes.

“Your counterpart,” he said. “Your mirror. Your other half.”

The revelation left silent for a long mont.

I stared at the mirage, at the man who wore my face, and felt a strange, creeping vertigo. It wasn’t fear. It was the discomfort of recognizing myself in sothing I didn’t want to acknowledge.

“Surely, we can talk this out. If there’s no need to fight, then it is better to not fight, right?”

Feng Wei looked at as if I had said sothing unbearably naïve.

“We’re the sa person,” I continued. “Different paths, different circumstances, but the sa core. If I can reach him—”

“Stop holding on to false hopes,” Feng Wei cut in.

His tone was flat and unyielding.

“The only outco of your eting,” he said, “is his death or yours.”

I stiffened. “You’re that certain?”

“Yes.”

He stepped closer, and before I could react, his hand plunged into my abdon. There was no pain. Only a cold, existential wrongness. Feng Wei withdrew his hand, and in his palm hovered the Source.

My Source.

The miniature Earth rotated slowly, light and shadow folding into one another. Seeing it outside my body made my stomach twist in a way no wound ever had.

“The other you,” Feng Wei said calmly, “holds the other half.”

I stared at the floating world, my breath shallow.

“The Source is incomplete,” he went on. “And against a foe like that, incompleteness is death. The only way you win is by achieving superior mastery over it.”

He released the Source.

It snapped back into my abdon as if pulled by an unseen gravity. My body shuddered, quintessence rippling outward before stabilizing.

I exhaled slowly.

“You said the other Lost Gods and Ancient Souls aren’t on my side,” I said. “What does that an? Are they backing him?”

Feng Wei shook his head.

“They don’t care,” he replied. “The superior one will prevail. That is all that matters to them, which is precisely why my presence here is controversial.”

I looked at him sharply. “Then why are you here?”

For the first ti, Feng Wei’s expression shifted.

“When I was cast down into the Hollowed World,” he said, “I fell alongside two compatriots. I lived among mortals. I suffered. I learned.”

His gaze softened, just slightly.

“I learned to love life again.”

The words caught off guard.

“And because of that,” he continued, “I want to give them a chance.”

“Them?” I asked.

“You,” Feng Wei said. “And the people tied to you.”

He lifted his hand and summoned the mirage once more.

This ti, it wasn’t a single figure.

It was devastation.

A crimson flood swallowing the Empire. Cities erased. Mountains drowned. Faces I recognized and cherished, falling one by one. I saw my Six Path souls being torn apart, erased with casual brutality.

And at the center of it all stood him.

The other .

I felt sothing inside crack.

My fist clenched so tightly I heard bone strain against itself. Rage surged up my spine, hot and suffocating, threatening to drown reason entirely.

I forced it down.

There was no point in losing control. No point in begging Feng Wei to send back when he had already decided I wasn’t ready.

With an edge creeping into my voice, I asked, “So what do I do next?”

Feng Wei studied for a mont, as if asuring my resolve.

“Unsealing your mories has unsealed your potential,” he said. “But even now, you cannot compete with him.”

I t his gaze, jaw set.

“Then tell how,” I said. “Because I’m not staying here while my world burns.”

Feng Wei did not answer imdiately. Instead, he looked past , toward the floating ruins of the Temple of the End, as though his gaze could pierce ti itself. “I was able to retain mories of two realities,” he said at last, “because I witnessed it happen.”

I frowned. “Witnessed what?”

“The previous weapon,” Feng Wei replied. “The one before you. I experienced the mont he split ti with my own existence. From that mont on, I was no longer bound to a single flow.”

His eyes returned to .

“You were divided,” he continued. “Not rely in power, but in concept. One part of you beca the existence that dwelled within the Source. The other beca the divine weapon you were forged into.”

I felt a chill crawl up my spine.

“You,” Feng Wei said, pointing at , “have only existed in this world for less than five hundred years.”

I bristled. “That’s not—”

“Even if you include your ti in ng Po’s world,” he went on calmly, “cultivating there, learning the Six Paths, reaching the peak of the Longevity Path, it does not change the fact that your growth was erratic. Brilliant, yes. But full of sharp turns.”

He paused, then added, almost casually, “And you have a flaw in your cultivation. One you likely only discovered recently.”

My eyes widened. “How do you know ng Po?”

Feng Wei waved it off. “That isn’t important.”

I exhaled sharply, irritation bubbling up. “You make it sound like I’ve been stumbling around blindly. The gap between and him can’t be that large.”

He raised an eyebrow, inviting to continue.

“I fought a Hell’s Gate as a Demi-God with barely any cultivation,” I said, unable to stop myself. “I survived a direct clash with Aixin, who should’ve been a high-ranking God, by charging in knowing full well it might kill . I even challenged the Supre Void itself in the False Earth—”

“That other version of you slew the Supre Void,” Feng Wei interrupted.

I stopped mid-breath.

“With words, the Source,” he said evenly, “and a degree of brutality you cannot imagine.”

Silence fell between us.

I closed my mouth.

“He began far earlier than you,” Feng Wei continued. “Back when even the allies you rely on now had not yet been born. While you struggled, hesitated, and built bonds, he slaughtered his way to the top achieving a realm of power you would never be able to imagine. I shudder at the thought of what he would do to you once he got a hold of you.”

My chest tightened.

“In a single century,” Feng Wei said, “he beca the strongest being in the Hollowed World.”

I looked at him sharply. “You keep saying all this like you watched it happen. How?”

“I found a loophole in the reincarnation system of the Hollowed World,” he answered. “As a Martial God, I slipped through it. I witnessed his path across countless lives. I saw the atrocities he committed.”

His voice grew heavier.

“That is how I know he cannot be allowed to win.”

I searched his face, finding no mockery there. Only resolve.

“Even if it costs my soul,” Feng Wei said quietly, “I am willing to go against the wishes of my people. After this, I will likely suffer a terrible fate.”

He looked at directly.

“Now that I’ve shown you my sincerity,” he asked, “can you trust a little more?”

I felt a knot tighten in my chest.

There was sothing in Feng Wei’s tone that unsettled , a quiet resolve that usually preceded acts I would later regret witnessing. I looked at him carefully before speaking.

“Fine,” I said. “I’m willing to trust you.”

He exhaled, as though he had been holding his breath for a long ti. “The truth is that I don’t know the next step.”

I stared at him. “You dragged here, beat into the ground, tore open my mories, and you don’t know what cos next?”

He did not flinch. “Only you can know it.”

I rubbed my face with one hand and sighed. “That’s reassuring. Truly.”

“You must find a way to use the Source creatively,” Feng Wei continued. “In a way that only you would think of. The Source is not just power. It is a world. A myth. A foundation.”

I glanced at the floating False Earth above us. “Even the best motivational speeches have their limits.”

Feng Wei nodded once. “I know. Which is why I have an idea.”

I looked at him warily. “I’m listening.”

“You need to spend more ti living as the Source,” he said.

There was a pause.

“How?” I asked.

He answered by punching . The annihilation fist landed before I could react, and my body collapsed inward, unraveling into light, matter, and concept. I was reduced once more to the Source.

Darkness embraced as awareness soon took over.

I regenerated slowly and painfully, my existence knitting itself together through vast expenditure of quintessence. If I had used Divine Word: Raise, it would have been faster and cleaner. But this regeneration was different and cruder. I was rebuilding myself from the inside out.

I blinked awake.

Another fist slamd into my face again… and then again.

I lost count of how many tis it happened. Each cycle ended the sa way. Obliteration. Return. Reconstruction. Impact.

Sowhere between the countless repetitions, sothing changed.

At so indeterminate mont, I stopped reforming as myself first.

I beca aware before I had a body.

I was the sky.

I was the earth beneath it.

I was the sea, the currents, and the pressure of water miles below the surface. I was the wind scraping across continents, the tremor of tectonic plates, and the quiet pulse of life spreading everywhere at once.

I could feel them.

Every human being. Every breath. Every fragile existence scattered across the surface of Earth.

The sensation was overwhelming, and intimate beyond comfort. I did not observe them from afar. I felt them as extensions of myself.

Instinctively, I searched for one presence in particular.

.

My awareness narrowed, compressing, racing across oceans and landmasses until it settled on a familiar archipelago. I descended, perception sharpening until I could see stone, soil, and grass.

I stared at my grave.

The earth above it was undisturbed. Beneath it lay my casket and inside was my rotting mortal body. There was no denial left in then. No clever excuse or taphysical loophole.

I was dead.

Before I could linger on the realization, an imnse force seized my awareness and tore it outward. The world collapsed into abstraction, and sensation inverted violently.

I was back in the Temple of the End.

Feng Wei stood before , his expression unchanged.

His fist was already moving.

Darkness rushed to et again as he annihilated once more, sending back into the Source.

I did better this ti.

Instead of resisting the sensation, I imrsed myself in it.

I was the sky again, and the earth beneath it, the seas and the oceans, but it did not stop there. I beca electricity humming through utility poles, signals racing along cables, and data pulsing through invisible pathways.

Before I realized it, I beca the internet.

The realization nearly startled out of the state. It was absurd and intimate at the sa ti. I could feel buildings as static weight and purpose, cars as motion and inertia, a stapler as cold tal and trivial function, a urinal as porcelain and neglect. I was everything that had been made, shaped, or repurposed.

Everything except life.

I could not beco people. Nor animals. Nor plants. Living things resisted instinctively, as though the Source respected a boundary I could sense but not cross.

As I drifted through this omnipresent awareness, nostalgia crept in, followed closely by bitterness. This world, my old world, was achingly familiar. The temptation to return, to simply remain here and dissolve into quiet omniscience, was strong.

But there were still people who needed .

That thought anchored .

I regenerated from the Source once more.

Feng Wei annihilated again.

The cycle repeated, but each ti I gathered myself faster. I learned how to reassemble my sense of self before it scattered too far, how to stabilize my awareness before being dragged back into form.

Ti behaved strangely within the Source. It was static and dynamic at once, frozen and flowing simultaneously. The contradiction did not hurt my mind the way it should have; it simply existed. I felt that even if millions of years passed outside, nothing fundantal would change here.

With that realization, I began to observe.

I watched lives unfold across the planet, not as a voyeur but as a silent witness embedded in the structure of the world itself. That was when I found them.

Wen Yuhan.

Yuan Shen.

They were here.

They lived in China under different nas, a mother and son pair, their lives comfortable, even privileged. Wealth had found them easily in this incarnation. Yuan Shen, however, suffered from blindness. I wondered if it was karma, a quiet echo of the things he had done in another life.

For the longest ti, I had believed the two of them existed only in my mories, phantoms carried over from the Hollowed World and the False Earth.

Yet here they were.

I did sothing impulsive. I sent Wen Yuhan an email, asking if she rembered the Hollowed World. The False Earth. Anything beyond this life.

She ignored it.

I grimaced. Of course she did.

The cycles continued from obliteration, imrsion, and observation. Sowhere along the way, a voice called out to . It was Wen Yuhan’s voice. I was pulled inward, no longer spread across the world but drawn into a single, intimate space. Her bedroom. She slept beside her husband, her breathing steady and calm.

I slipped into her dream.

She stood before , whole and composed, dressed not as a mortal but as herself, sothing closer to what I rembered.

“How are you liking mortal life?” I asked.

“It’s fine,” she replied calmly. “But why are you looking for ?”

We talked for a long ti.

She spoke of this world, of its rules and rhythms, of the quiet weight of living without mory of divinity or catastrophe. This incarnation of hers did not rember the Hollowed World or the False Earth, not consciously.

Yet sothing remained.

A destiny. A fragnt. A stubborn thread that refused to vanish.

“If you need help,” she told , “just say it. I can influence my incarnation… subtly. Don’t hold back. I will help you as much as I can, if it ans repaying you for helping reunite with my disciple…”

I let out a tired breath. “I don’t even know what to do.”

So I told her everything. Feng Wei. The Source. The mories I had unsealed. The other . The inevitable confrontation looming ahead. I told her I was about to fight myself.

We tested ideas together, theories and half-ford possibilities, tracing the shape of solutions that never quite solidified. There were no answers yet, but for the first ti since arriving at the Temple of the End, I did not feel entirely alone.

The idea ca to all at once, sharp enough that I almost snapped back into myself.

The Ga Master.

Not the counterfeit Supre Void had dangled in front of , but the real one. The old man I had t once, fleetingly, inside Joan’s mind. If anyone understood systems, abstraction, the Source itself, and the strange logic that governed power across realities, it would be him.

I flowed into the internet with renewed purpose, dispersing myself across servers, archives, dead links, and forgotten forums. I searched for Lost Legends Online, for traces of its deeper structure, and its anomalies. I even tried to enlist Wen Yuhan’s help, but her current incarnation was maddeningly pragmatic. She had no interest in gas, imrsion, or nostalgia. Profit margins and business forecasts held her full attention.

After exhaustive searching, I found nothing.

No old man.

Only the original developers, ordinary people whose brilliance never crossed the boundary into divinity. They were denizens of this world, and nothing more.

Frustration mounted.

In desperation, I tried to build a body for myself using quintessence, shaping matter directly from the Source. The rejection was imdiate and violent. The Source recoiled from the attempt as if I had violated a fundantal rule.

Fine, I thought. Then I tried another approach.

Technology.

I attempted to orchestrate the construction of a chanical body, a vessel that could house indirectly. A Skynet solution. That failed as well. Supply chains collapsed. Key components malfunctioned. Accidents happened for no discernible reason. Fires, power outages, corrupted data. Every path closed itself just before completion.

This Source was infuriatingly precise in what it would not allow.

anwhile, Feng Wei was losing patience. He demanded progress and proof that I could wield the Source creatively enough to stand against the other .

And he was right about one thing.

That version of had to be stopped.

Then the spark of inspiration ca.

It was inelegant to the point of monstrously crude and embarrassing.

But it had precedent.

I went back to China and sought out Wen Yuhan again, this ti directly in her dreams. I begged her to help with sothing strange and uncertain. She listened, arms crossed, and said plainly that she would not promise anything. Her incarnation was stubborn, and influence had limits.

To my surprise, Yuan Shen joined us.

He appeared sheepish but earnest, remarking that his incarnation was much younger and far easier to sway. Perhaps, the two of them together could manage sothing.

Master and disciple exchanged a glance, then nodded.

I had no idea what this would beco, but the montum was there now.

I sent an email to Karen.

“What do you think about making a spin-off ga of Lost Legends Online?”

I watched her through the Source. Brown hair, jerky in hand, code filling her screen. She froze mid-bite as she read the ssage. Excitent flickered across her face, quickly followed by hesitation and regret.

She typed a polite rejection.

I sent another email imdiately, offering generous compensation.

Karen groaned aloud. She leaned back in her chair, conflicted. She had always been like this, principled to a fault. She was also one of my closest friends back then, and one of the earliest developers of LLO. If anyone could handle the creative direction of what I was proposing, it was her.

Eventually, she replied.

“What kind of ga?”

I answered honestly.

“A cross-platform MMORPG. Based on LLO. About a Paladin lost in the wrong mythology. Genre mash-up. Title: Lost Paladin Online.”

She cringed so hard I felt it through the Source.

“An MMO? In this day and age? And a genre mash-up?” She paused, then added, “You might as well call it a crossover.”

I buried my face in my hands, despite not having a body.

Honestly, I would have been happy with ten players.

Ten was enough.

If I could power-level even a handful of them to my realm, they would be monsters. Rockstars. Variables the other could not easily account for. Admittedly, it would be awkward for a ga if I gave the players too much power, early-ga.

Still, doubt crept in.

This plan was reckless, half-baked, and built on hope more than certainty. It echoed sothing an old man once did, long ago, with far more finesse than I could muster. I probably wouldn’t have as much breadth in ‘classes’ to offer for the ga since I could only bestow Paladin Legacy on others, but I have to make it work.

I hovered in the Source, watching Karen stare at her screen, weighing nostalgia against practicality.

“Fine,” muttered Karen. “Let’s do it, if at least just for the mories…”